Just how lovable are you?
It is a question that we might ask ourselves every now and again… and it is a question that particularly comes to me reading the letter of St John this Sunday. He says, ‘We ourselves have known and put our faith in God’s love towards ourselves’. In today’s Gospel Jesus says to God our Father, ‘As you sent me into the world, I have sent them into the world’. But we can only be active in the world in Jesus and the Father’s name if we are willing to wrestle with the reality of the truth in our lives, that God loves us.
I know I often say that we are all very good at falling in love – it can be very easy, it is intoxicating and we can love being wrapped up in it. It energises us and makes us feel ‘alive’. BUT, allowing ourselves to BE loved can be a very different thing.
What if the other person gets to know what I am really like? What if I find myself being challenged to see what I am really like, that part of me that I might have been trying to escape from for a very long time. Can I cope with the truth, am I willing to trust another person with whom and what I am?
You see, we are only going to be able to be God’s messengers in the world if we believe that He truly loves us, every bit of us, and accept that this is so. ‘Apart from me, you can do nothing’, Jesus tells us when he speaks of being the vine and we the branches. It is Jesus’ love that we bring into the (our) world through the Holy Spirit by the gift of God the Father, OUR father.
So, let me tell you now, you are LOVABLE, whether you like it or not? God LOVED you into being and it us God’s LOVE that sustains your every moment; so, deep breath time, go and stand in front of the mirror and look at yourself and say ‘thank you Lord for loving me, help me to accept Your love and love You in return’.